waltermoreira/alpine-rust

Image for statically compiling Rust apps

Statically compiling Rust binaries

This is a recipe for statically compiling a Rust binary that includes native dependencies (i.e., an external library). This repository includes a sample application using ZeroMQ. The binary generated with this image can be distributed without the need of including libzmq or any other dependency.

Building the image

Simply build from the provided docker-compose.yaml file:

git clone ...
cd alpine-rust
sudo docker-compose build

Compiling the sample app

To compile the sample app, run:

sudo docker-compose run alpine-rust

Obtain the binary at sample/target/x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/debug/sample. Check that it is self-contained with:

ldd sample/target/x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/debug/sample
# should print `statically linked`

You can pass the option --release to the docker-compose invocation, to build a release version of the binary.

Compiling your Rust app

• Add any necessary native library to the Dockerfile and rebuild the container.

• Update (or create) the file build.rs at the root of your Rust app (check the provided example sample/build.rs). This file needs to declare all the native libraries to be statically compiled. This process can include some trial and error until build.rs lists all the libraries (notice that the sample app needs to include libsodium and libstdc++, even though the only "apparent" dependency is libzmq).

• Run

  sudo SRC=/path/to/my/app docker-compose run alpine-rust  # optionally, add `--release`